Ferment (1863-1870)
tience with architecture and in his growing ambitions to write. He composed verses—sonnets, for the most part. In 1864 he began also to toy with prose. A little story, or more properly a narrative essay based on personal experiences, called How I Built Myself a House, was set down and dispatched to Chambers's Journal. It was accepted by the editors and appeared anonymously on March 18, 1865. It was a genial and graceful account of the troubles and pleasures experienced by a man with a small family in having a house designed and built for himself. The architect's point of view is very much in evidence, together with a rather disillusioned ground-tone, otherwise, the piece possesses little distinction. It certainly does not foreshadow the stylist of whom Stevenson said, "I would give my right hand to be able to write like Thomas Hardy."
The spirit-searchings of the young man were fully and eloquently recorded, however, in the lyrics which he indited at this time. Many of them, fortunately, survived the vicissitudes of thirty or more years, in spite of their constant rejection by editors, and appeared, properly dated, in the series of poetic volumes which began to see publication in 1898, with the Wessex Poems.
In general, these extant early poems, from which, one may be sure, the chaff has been carefully winnowed out, show such a self-conscious but natural art, and are for the most part based on such a definite intellectual scheme that one may feel fairly safe in judging the majority of them as expressions of deep and lasting convictions.
Amabel is the only surviving poem of the year 1865. There is clearly traceable in it the influence of the Tenny-
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